Charter for Working Group

The IETF has traditionally developed application protocols directly ontop of a raw TCP stream. However, there is a growing set of problemswhich many application protocols have to solve regardless of what theprotocols do. This WG will identify the common problems that deployedIETF protocols have solved, identify the successes and failures thatdeployed IETF protocols made when addressing these problems and designa simple core protocol to address these problems. This core protocolmay then be used by future application protocols to simplify both theprocess of protocol design and the complexity of implementingmulti-protocol clients or servers.

In order to keep the WG in focus, the following items are explicitlyout-of-scope:

* Backwards compatibility with existing application protocols Backwards compatibility often compromises correct design. If this WG is successful it will impact a great number of future protocols, and thus the design errors which backwards compatibility might dictate must be avoided.

* Transport layers other than TCP/IP This has been a rathole in too many other WGs.

* New features If a problem hasn't been solved in at least two deployed IETF application protocols, then it is out-of-scope for the base core protocol spec. This does not preclude individuals or other groups from doing extensions to the core protocol which might be used by multiple future application protocols; it just limits the scope of the core spec.

* Normative references to other application protocols or non-public specs. The core protocol has to stand by itself. It may reference protocol building blocks that have been used by several other application protocols such as ABNF, language tags, UTF-8, domain names, URLs, MIME, SASL, GSSAPI and TLS. It must avoid normative references to full application protocols such as ACAP, HTTP, IMAP, LDAP, and SMTP. It must avoid normative references to any document which is not freely and publicly available on the Internet.